I went to sleep at 4:30 am last night. I was reading a book that was fascinating, riveting, and I could not put it down until it came to some conclusion. Then I got up at 8:30 this morning to finish it. The conclusion was even more stunning than the whole book.
The book, The Hot Zone by Richard Preston is a documentary thriller about viruses that come out of the African rain forests and kill people, like aids, like ebola and its different strains.
The book says that the viruses that are on the border of alive/not alive are millions or billions of years old parasites and that their behavior is entirely selfish and they come up as a reaction to the elimination of the rain forests and the overpopulation of the planet by human parasites.
I nodded as I read it. Human beings, like viruses, like parasites, only care about their host a little bit, but for the most part they only care about themselves. They use their environment to make more of themselves, whether that destroys the host or not.
I don’t have a TV, but from time to time, when I am forced to check my yahoo mail online, I am exposed to the “news.” I always regret that I watched any of it, it is all very depressing.
Yesterday I saw the story of this mother of a 13-year old with Hodgkins sarcoma, who didn’t want “traditional” (aka money hungry, it is good for my doctors’ pocket book) medicine, and now the police force is after him. And hearing the tone of voice of the anchorwoman who completely agreed with the judge that she didn’t have the right to decide, blah, blah, blah.
Jim Humble discovered a new use for an old substance, sodium chlorite, the cheap desinfector that has been used for ages to clean floors, walls, water, but after his unusual inspiration can be used to kill parasites, bad bacteria, fungus like candida albicans and viruses inside your body and even inside your cells. He calls his activated sodium chlorite the “miracle mineral supplement” because if he called it anything else, he would get killed. Literally. He is also forced to live out of the country.
So what the heck am I trying to say, and why is the title of this post “Freedom?”
Good question. Let’s get to it.
Freedom. Here is what the dictionary has to say
1: the quality or state of being free: as
a: the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action
b: liberation from slavery or restraint or from the power of another : independence
c: the quality or state of being exempt or released usually from something onerous <freedom from care>
d: ease, facility <spoke the language with freedom>
e: the quality of being frank, open, or outspoken <answered with freedom>
f: improper familiarity g: boldness of conception or execution h: unrestricted use <gave him the freedom of their home> 2 a: a political right b: franchise, privilege
synonyms freedom, liberty, license mean the power or condition of acting without compulsion. freedom has a broad range of application from total absence of restraint to merely a sense of not being unduly hampered or frustrated <freedom of the press>. liberty suggests release from former restraint or compulsion <the released prisoner had difficulty adjusting to his new liberty>. license implies freedom specially granted or conceded and may connote an abuse of freedom <freedom without responsibility may degenerate into license>.
In my mind freedom is a lot less complicated. You can have or lack freedom from something, and you can have or lack freedom for something that you want.
One of human beings’ slavery is wanting and desiring for the self alone. In that regard we are a lot like the virus that has 7 protein molecules, no brain, no signs of aliveness without a host. I we talked and I told you that you behave like a virus: your whole life is about getting what you want and you don’t care about anyone else, you would be very offended. Right? But chances are that I would be right, very high percentage of the time, to a very high degree.
You see, I think that human beings evolved to have the three levels of brain, and free will, to be a lot more intelligent than we are at this point of human development. I have read that Kabbalah says that there is a need for only 10 human beings reach the level of consciousness concurrently (I mean living at the same time, arriving there and being there at the same time) for a critical mass where all of humanity suddenly evolves, in spite of themselves, to the higher consciousness where live isn’t about “what’s in it for me” but about “what’s in it for you”.
And in spite of the fact that hundreds of spiritual teachers, gurus, disciplines are around, there hasn’t been any time in human history that there were ten individuals at the same time who arrived to this level. Because this level is really like being pregnant: you can’t be a little bit pregnant, almost pregnant, somewhat pregnant. You are either pregnant or you aren’t.
But as long as human beings aren’t even interested in the “symptoms” of being a slave to selfishness, there is hardly any chance for us to get to that level.
According to Kabbalah we have some 240 years to straighten out our acts by out own volition, or method number two, the learning through suffering enters the picture, where you either learn or you perish.
Some 2,000 years ago there was a famous Kabbalist, Rabbi Akiva who had 25 thousand students. Many of those studies day and night, and were thought to be on a high level of connection, a high level of consciousness.
But when a deadly plague came, like the Black Plague, or the Aids epidemic, only five of them survived. Rabbi Akiva had a rude awakening: he realized that all the knowledge in the world doesn’t elevate you, unless you base your whole life on the basis of “love your neighbor as yourself.” Which is what’s missing… and with it freedom is missing, and slavery reigns “supreme.”
